The Odyssey 5/10
TLDR: I didn’t enjoy it. I thought the cinematography was impressive but that’s about it.
Having read it two years ago, and enjoyed it, I was looking forward to this. I hadn’t seen any trailers or any of the hype, so I’d no idea who’d be in it. Anne Hathaway (swoon) was very good, Matt Damon was decent. Zendaya was a waste of space as Athena and I don’t see why she gets the plaudits she does.
Tom Holland was similarly weak in his portrayal of Telemachus. And there were too many annoying departures from the original story.
We were in the second row from the back yet it still felt that we were much too close to the screen. It was impossible to take in a scene without scanning the enormous 80ft x 60ft screen. Is this what Imax is supposed to be like? God knows how the folk in the front rows felt.
Then there was the audio. I’ve read reviews from people praising the soundtrack but I don’t recall hearing any music. All I could hear was a never-ending boom … boom … boom in any scene that was supposed to be dramatic. Instead of increasing the drama by acting, the director chose to do so by increasing the volume and frequency of the boom to BOOM BOOM BOOM and just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, it became BOOM BOOM BOOM. The entire auditorium shook and vibrated with the intensity of this.
This thunderous repetition was the only soundtrack I was aware of.
My wife spent most of the time with her hands over her ears during these scenes; that’s how uncomfortable the sound level was. Again, I’m not sure if this is a ‘feature’ of an Imax screening or if it would be true in a normal cinema.
Common with most modern films, the clarity (not volume) of the dialogue was poor, meaning that we missed probably 20-25% of what was being said.
Not a film I’d watch again, unless to pick out all the areas of Scotland I recognised, nor would I go back to an Imax.